Try to write about something besides sorrow and sickness. I weigh less than a hundred pounds now and throw up almost every day, so I ought to try to amuse myself in some way besides rereading Stephen King books I know by heart. One amusing but seldom-mentioned aspect of life in New Orleans is introducing black people to the wonders of smoking from a bong. Most poor black potsmokers here have never even seen a water pipe. Chris and I theorize that this is because notorious DA Jim Garrison shut down the head shops in his 1960s "cleanup" of Bourbon Street. From then until just a few years ago, bongs were unavailable or hard to find in the city, especially its poorer parts, and a whole generation grew up unexposed to the fancier aspects of weed consumption unless they read High Times or traveled. Most poor black New Orleanians didn't do either. Chris first discovered this while working with an all-black kitchen crew at Pere Antoine's, a tourist joint in the French Quarter. They were used to buying their pot in itty bitty $15-$20 bags and rolling it in papers. Most knew how to improvise the timeless toilet paper roll/tinfoil pipe, and a couple had smoked from wooden dugouts, but they were completely unfamiliar with water pipes of any sort. They all liked the bong, though. Tonight my neighbor Shalene stopped by and happened to see my bong. (I don't usually keep it sitting right out, but my discretionary abilities aren't all they might be lately.) She asked me what kind of drinking glass it was -- or was it a vase? I gave her a toke out of it and, I think, kind of blew her mind. According to her boyfriend, Eddie, who does various odd jobs for me, the chattering class in this neighborhood is absolutely flummoxed by us. We do not fit their stereotypes of "white people," we are not trying to "fit in" in some absurd way with the black people, and we have a bunch of really weird-looking shit in our backyard. The only consensus that has been reached so far, from Eddie's mouth to your ear: "Those people, they quiet."